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Last year I was in a meeting when a new employee was introduced as, “a young lady”. No. No. No. No. No.
According to a basic Google search young lady is defined as “a woman who is not far advanced in life; a girl.”
Yeah. So last I checked, there were no girls working in my office. There are women, plenty of women. And none of them, just like none of the men in my office, need their identities qualified by their age.
Young lady is not the polite way of announcing a woman’s youth. Young lady is a girl who is starting to mature. It is insulting and demeaning, if used incorrectly, especially in the workplace—an environment that we know can be unwelcoming to women.
Here’s the other thing: even if we don’t mean for young lady to be a belittling term, there’s really no reason, in a professional setting, for you to reference a colleague’s youth. Plain and simply because it’s just not relevant. She’s working with you because of her professional achievements, not because of her age. So describe her based on what she’s done, not based on how old she is.
Save the “young lady” term for your 9 year old niece. Or better yet, lose it entirely. It’s filled with expectations about how a child should be acting based on her gender which now sounds just as offensive as using it in the office.